Edinburgh Festival Fringe should be given same status as Olympics, says outgoing boss

Shona McCarthy warned the Fringe, which is the world’s biggest arts festival, attracting millions of visitors, is not given public support for a large-scale event.

Ms McCarthy, who will stand down this week from the helm of the Fringe Society after nine years in the role, said the infrastructure was not able to cope with the numbers of visitors, with issues such as dead zones for overstretched mobile phone networks and accommodation issues for both artists and audience members.

In contrast, events like the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games, which is to be held in Glasgow again next year, have dedicated athletes’ accommodation and transport networks set up for the duration of the event.

Speaking to The Guardian, Ms McCarthy said: “I still don’t understand why these things are treated so differently.

“You can’t just go with something of the scale of the Fringe, of the global importance and brand of the Fringe, you can’t say ‘well, we support all the artists to go to it, so therefore it’s fine’.

“You would never say that about the Commonwealth Games or the Olympics. We’re hosting an event of that scale in this city every single year without any of that central infrastructure that you would automatically get with a sporting event.”

Ms McCarthy said in refence to the mobile phone issue: “This is not rocket science. This is something that can absolutely be sorted.”

She said she had “lobbied like crazy” for ScotRail and Network Rail to put on later trains for people travelling to the Fringe from elsewhere in Scotland, claiming she had been surprised to find there were no late running trains when she arrived in Edinburgh in 2016.